Economic Embeddedness and Organizational Survival of U.S. Environmental Nonprofits

• In Event: Economic Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 7: Networks, Embeddedness, and Markets

Abstract

When do organizations survive, and when do they fail? Prior research has demonstrated the relationships among field-level density, concentration, organizational specialization, and survival. However, we know relatively little about how economic interrelations among organizations within the same field relate to survival. I investigate how embeddedness in an economic network of grant-making and -receiving impacts organizational mortality. Using electronic tax filings from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), I map the population of U.S. environmental non-profits from 2016-2023. Preliminary descriptive findings show consistent turnover among environmental non-profits, with mortality rates higher for organizations that neither made nor received a grant from another environmental organization. Moreover, employing methods from social network analysis, I analyze the patterns of grantmaking and find a field marked by a few grantmaking hubs with limited reciprocity and transitivity.

Author

• Jenna L Wertsching, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill